]]>Loans are the lifeblood of your community financial institution. In fact, revenue from loans makes up 50-80% of the average CFI’s business revenue. So it’s no wonder that credit unions and community banks like yours want to keep their lending portfolios growing, even as competition from non-traditional lenders and big banks increases.
One simple way to increase your lending velocity is to mine the data you already have about existing customers to identify the ones most likely to respond positively to lending offers. Then use these insights to send out targeted marketing campaigns, encouraging customers to bring more of their products under your roof. Here’s how it can work:

1) Use a business analytics tool to find customers with recurrent loan payments to other institutions. You’ll want to review Core Banking Systems, Loan Origination Systems, Profitability Tools, as well as your other 3rd party data sources. You can also glean useful information from transactional data like ACH reports and Credit Bureau reports. Look for regular biweekly or monthly payments to credit providers, and then check for how long those payments have been occurring. With a bit of detective work, you’ll develop an understanding of your customers’ current and upcoming credit needs, and be poised to make offers that will suit them better.

2 ) Create marketing campaigns for each loan product you want to promote. These campaigns should consist of multiple touchpoints to help nurture opportunities through the sales funnel with specific email messaging. Match customer segments to specific email campaigns to ensure the most relevant messaging possible. For example, customers with auto loans or mortgages with renewals coming up receive prompts and incentives to move the loan to your organization – the right message, at the right time.

3) Send out the emails, and then monitor each customer’s actions. If the customer opens the email and clicks-through to your website, they are expressing a degree of interest. If they reply or forward the email, then they are displaying an even higher degree of engagement. Refer interested customers to your product specialists, who can work with them to sell the loan.

By getting your personalized offers in front of customers before your competitors do, and making it worthwhile to switch providers, you can grow your lending portfolio rapidly. But that’s not all – this approach also has a nice knock-on effect in terms of customer satisfaction as well. When your customers see that you are proactively looking out for their needs, their loyalty increases. It’s a win-win approach to lending.

Want more tips on mining your data to identify the right candidates for each of your loan products? Download this eBook and learn how to accelerate your lending through digitization.

]]>http://www.doxim.com/blog/mine-your-data-and-sell-more-loans/feed/0http://www.doxim.com/blog/mine-your-data-and-sell-more-loans/Pop quiz: What’s top of mind for that customer over there?http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/doximblog/~3/szxDGsABDRc/
http://www.doxim.com/blog/pop-quiz-whats-top-of-mind-for-that-customer-over-there/#commentsFri, 02 Dec 2016 15:40:48 +0000http://www.doxim.com/?post_type=blog&p=17043Many community banks and credit unions have a general sense of what many of their customers want. Few can drill ... Read More

Many community banks and credit unions have a general sense of what many of their customers want. Few can drill down to identify an individual customer’s priorities. The trouble is, that’s what really matters. It helps to know a customer is part of a given demographic group, but that’s not enough. People move in and out of life stages at different times. They skip steps. They mix up the order. Unless you can drill down to find out what’s top of mind for that customer, the one over there, you can’t personalize the service you deliver.

And personalizing is the name of the game in a world where non-financial businesses like Amazon, Uber and Airbnb are setting the customer experience bar high, fintechs are rapidly developing innovative solutions that bypass traditional financial institutions (see “3 things you can learn from fintechs”), and big banks are actively mining their vast stores of customer information to gain market share. But where is a community financial institution to begin?

Take inventory

You have lots of data—every organization does these days. In that mass of names, addresses, balances and transactions, what can help you get to know each customer better so you can target offers and provide exceptional service?

The first step is to take stock of what you know. With a comprehensive inventory of the data you have, you can identify questions to ask your customers to fill in the data you need.

Mine your data

Do outgoing bill payments suggest a loan held at another financial institution? Does a name change following marriage mean a mortgage on a new home is coming soon? These are opportunities for one-to-one marketing messages that reach the right customer at the right time.

Technological tools such as business analytics can help you transform your data into meaningful, actionable insights, as well as enable you to anticipate future needs.

Share information

Your customers are telling you what they need all the time. With customer relationship management (CRM) solutions, your customer service representatives can gather information and spread it across your organization. Your marketing team, for example, can then access that data to send each customer relevant messaging through their preferred channel.

Put it all together and you can digitize to personalize—building wallet share, cementing relationships with new customers and minimizing client attrition. Just how important is digital engagement to your bottom line? As one indicator, consider that it may mean the difference between your average customer holding 2.7 products and 4.4 products.[1] That’s wallet share, that’s loyalty — and that’s revenue.

]]>http://www.doxim.com/blog/pop-quiz-whats-top-of-mind-for-that-customer-over-there/feed/0http://www.doxim.com/blog/pop-quiz-whats-top-of-mind-for-that-customer-over-there/3 Things You Can Learn From Fintechshttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/doximblog/~3/bF9n6ic9rl4/
http://www.doxim.com/blog/3-things-can-learn-fintechs/#commentsFri, 25 Nov 2016 21:16:40 +0000http://www.doxim.com/?post_type=blog&p=17022Fintech start-ups are shaking up the financial services industry. Take Lending Club, for example. It has created an online credit ... Read More

]]>Fintech start-ups are shaking up the financial services industry. Take Lending Club, for example. It has created an online credit marketplace that connects borrowers to investors — completely bypassing traditional financial institutions. Betterment promises low-cost investing, with money allocated to index funds by algorithm — no need for an in-branch financial advisor there. Then there’s Kabbage, offering 100% online, automated lending, with fast applications, instant decisions and money available on the go through a mobile app. That’s hard to compete with if you’re a community bank or credit union constrained by tight regulation and tighter budgets.

One way to hold your own in an increasingly competitive digital world is to incorporate fintech strengths into your own organization. Here are three things they do very well. Learn from them and future-proof your community financial institution.

1. Keep your focus narrow

Fintechs often create innovative solutions for a very specific challenge consumers are having—say, getting affordable credit (Lending Club), investing without the drag of fees (Wealthfront) or processing credit card payments for small businesses (Square).

Take a look at your customers. Where are their pain points? How can you eliminate each one? A narrow focus helps you design targeted initiatives. These can be as simple as streamlining and differentiating your lending process with an efficient loan origination tool that allows your customers to apply anytime, anywhere they choose.

2.Embrace new technology

Fintechs understand the power of technology to transform processes. They don’t necessarily invent everything from scratch. Rather, they borrow bits and bytes and put them together in unique, goal-oriented ways.

Within your organization, too, the idea isn’t to use technology for technology’s sake. Instead, it’s to pick and choose solutions with clear benefits—whether that’s speeding up document access with an enterprise content management system or automating your campaigns with email marketing. Ideally, you want tools that work well on their own but are easily integrated with other components so you can upgrade over time as your budget allows.

3.Make customer experience your number-one priority

Fintechs pay a lot of attention to customer experience. Without a friendly, intuitive digital interface, they’re nothing, because they can’t fall back on in-person customer interactions to fix experience shortfalls.

More and more, you can’t either. Financial services customers increasingly interact across multiple channels, and if they aren’t satisfied with the experience, they have other alternatives readily at hand — including fintechs. One solution is to share information across your organization so customers can tell their story just once and problems can be solved at the first point of contact. A customer relationship management (CRM) tool that does this has an estimated return on investment of $8.70 per dollar spent.

By providing a great customer experience with every interaction, through every channel, you can improve client loyalty, generate referrals, increase revenue and efficiency and strengthen your brand. The stats are in and the fintechs aren’t going anywhere. Make sure you have a plan to stay competitive and beat them at their own game.

]]>http://www.doxim.com/blog/3-things-can-learn-fintechs/feed/0http://www.doxim.com/blog/3-things-can-learn-fintechs/Grow Membership the “New” Old-School Way: Personalized Messaging to SEGshttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/doximblog/~3/i92Tx2og_1M/
http://www.doxim.com/blog/grow-membership-the-new-old-school-way-personalized-messaging-to-segs/#commentsTue, 15 Nov 2016 21:12:52 +0000http://www.doxim.com/?post_type=blog&p=16988Anyone who’s worked in the credit union community more than a few weeks knows phrases like “mutual self-help” and “democratic ... Read More

]]>Anyone who’s worked in the credit union community more than a few weeks knows phrases like “mutual self-help” and “democratic member control” are features of our rich heritage. But there’s one key trait and membership requirement that endured hard-fought battles before finally being settled in the U.S. Supreme Court: the “common bond.” This allowed federal credit unions to open their doors to larger groups, like communities.

The expansion of community charters has allowed credit unions to grow and be more competitive. More importantly, a whole lot more people can benefit from their lower fees, better credit rates and other perks. But in embracing the community charter, many credit unions switched to a one-size-fits-all strategy instead of the “old school” approach of marketing to select employer groups (SEGs). Maybe that worked, but it meant missing out on some great opportunities.

What’s old is new again

Credit unions that overlook SEGs lose out on some real benefits. Members of a SEG enjoy shared experiences and interests, and often a mutual cause – their common bond. Your credit union can leverage this connection by creating offers personalized to their specific needs. One example: special loan rates to government employees affected by a temporary furlough. Another: a matching donation to a non-profit SEG’s charitable fund.

People also like the sense of community that comes from belonging to a group, giving SEGs word-of-mouth value. They are more likely to join your credit union or take out a loan if a friend, colleague or family member suggests it.

SEGs provide a built-in audience where you can promote membership through various products and services. To strengthen SEG relationships, many credit unions host orientations for new employee groups, give talks on topics like becoming a homeowner or cleaning up credit at company lunch-and- learn events, or offer loan specials exclusively for a SEG’s members. While these activities incur costs, they can also offer excellent ROI.

New school marketing

Of course, having a focus on SEGs doesn’t mean abandoning other marketing efforts. Regardless of affiliations, all members appreciate receiving relevant offers. And given consumers’ expectation for companies to understand their felt needs, it’s never been more important to ensure personalized member interactions.

Targeting offers to individual member needs and interests, along with additional efforts to engage members of different SEGs, may seem challenging. But it doesn’t have to be. A robust Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solution, combined with integrated email marketing and a business analytics program, can help your credit union easily reach out to members based on their stages of life, specific needs or mutual interests.

Forward thinking credit unions can take a fresh look at SEG marketing following these simple steps:

Identify businesses or local organizations that represent potential SEG opportunities. For example, community organizations participating alongside your credit union in outreach efforts might like to offer membership as a benefit for their employees or volunteers. Or perhaps there are similarities between employees of a local business and your current members. Once you identify a SEG prospect that’s a natural fit, you can leverage a suitable CRM platform (like Doxim CRM) to automate and manage the definition, dispatch and intelligent follow-up of personalized email campaigns targeted to HR departments or group leaders, to generate SEG interest.

Establish the SEG relationship and load prospective members’ names into a CRM. Once a SEG relationship has started, credit unions usually send potential SEG members a series of messages that focus on different membership benefits, along with an incentive for joining. Using Doxim CRM integrated with Doxim eMail Marketing you can send out targeted promotional campaigns to drive attendance at employee lunch and learns or information sessions onsite at the credit union. New members who sign up can be rewarded with gift certificates to local restaurants, a $25 deposit to their savings account or other specials.

Ensure a well-planned account opening process. When SEG members join your credit union, you can leverage a tool like Doxim Account Opening to automate the account opening process, leaving staff to focus on better understanding member desires, wants and needs, which can be easily captured and automatically propagated to Doxim CRM, to identify future cross-selling opportunities.

Enhance new-member relationships by leveraging gathered data. By using Doxim Business Analytics to slice and dice CRM, core and other back-office data sources, you can identify precisely targeted demographic groups that will best respond to marketing campaigns that present the right product or service to the right member at the right time. This will allow you to engage meaningfully with SEG members throughout the member lifecycle.

Old school marketing? Not at all! Smart, targeted and personalized business-to-business promotions to attract SEGs and then engage new members are about as new as today’s technology solutions will allow. And fully integrated solutions like Doxim’s Customer Engagement Platform, that bring you the CRM, Business Analytics and eMail Marketing tools you need, are just the ticket to make new or renewed SEG marketing efforts more successful than ever before.
Want to understand how Doxim can help you be successful with your SEG marketing efforts? Download our brochure “CRM for Marketing”to find out more.

The financial industry is feeling the effects of digital disruption. Smartphones, tablets and wearable tech have forever changed customer expectations – and many banks and credit unions are finding themselves offside when it comes to customer loyalty. Instead of delighting customers with digitized customer experiences that are on par with retail stars like Amazon and Starbucks, they have fallen into the “Customer Experience Gap” – the chasm between what customers have come to expect from their service providers and what they actually experience.

Overcoming the Customer Experience Gap is especially challenging for many community banks and credit unions because they don’t have the deep pockets of big banks or the innovative applications of fintech startups. But they tend to know their customers better than larger competitors. This knowledge, coupled with a fresh approach to digitization, can help community financial institutions build the capacity to climb out of the Gap. That’s important because a new CEB report shows that a satisfying digitized customer experience is exactly what consumers are looking for.

In “The Digital Tipping Point”, CEB points out that just three years ago, over 1/3 of consumers preferred to bank via personal channels. By 2016, that number had dropped to less than 20%, with nearly a quarter wanting to do their banking exclusively via digital channels. The rest (58%) also preferred digitized services but still saw value in having access to a bank employee when they needed it.

In the “good old days”, customers naturally went to their PFI to obtain a loan, open a new savings account or conduct other banking business. Consolidating all that activity with one institution was the easiest way for them to keep track of their personal finances. But here’s the rub: as customers’ digitized experiences grow and evolve, these same consumers no longer see the need to turn to a single financial institution for all these services.

Now, they can use their digital devices to easily manage multiple accounts with different institutions or service providers. There are apps for almost everything, and consumers are using them to build their own information and resource networks. So, while your customer is browsing Zillow for a bigger home he may come across an ad for the perfect mortgage. Or maybe when she’s looking for a new SUV online, a great finance deal pops up, accompanied by an ad for an easy to use digital loan process. As a result, these customers are making major financial and life decisions without your bank or credit union even knowing they had a need. By making sure they know that the same great digital experiences are available from their PFI, you can go a long way to ensure they choose you rather than a third party supplier when it comes time for that new mortgage or car loan.

According to CEB analysts, the vast majority of consumers now take digital convenience and access for granted. Yet they continue to value banks and credit unions that understand their needs, respond with relevant information and help them stay on track with their financial goals. By building out your digital infrastructure you can start to bridge the Gap, moving from routine customer interactions to extraordinary customer experiences – every time.

]]>http://www.doxim.com/blog/want-to-keep-your-customers-close-and-loyal-climb-out-of-the-customer-experience-gap/feed/0http://www.doxim.com/blog/want-to-keep-your-customers-close-and-loyal-climb-out-of-the-customer-experience-gap/Account Statements: Regulatory Obligation or Heart of the Customer Experience?http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/doximblog/~3/-0Fm1XheItk/
http://www.doxim.com/blog/account-statements-regulatory-obligation-or-heart-of-the-customer-experience/#commentsTue, 25 Oct 2016 20:01:44 +0000http://www.doxim.com/?post_type=blog&p=16766Here’s a familiar drill: It’s month end and time for the ritual of sending out customer statements. It’s a function ... Read More

]]>Here’s a familiar drill: It’s month end and time for the ritual of sending out customer statements. It’s a function all Community Financial Institutions (CFIs) perform so customers can reconcile their checking accounts and keep a record of the month’s activity. Providing statements is a fundamental banking routine, but not one of the more exciting account service activities. For many banks and credit unions, it’s treated as nothing more than a regulatory obligation.

But consider this: Your monthly statements are the only communication that gets delivered to all of your customers on a predictable basis. In addition, the average open rate of account statements across all channels is better than 95%. So they’re a vital communication vehicle that perhaps deserves more attention than you are currently giving them.

An Essential Part of Your Marketing Mix

Many CFIs already include statements in their promotional efforts because they recognize the marketing value of their consistent delivery, but very few view them asstrategic opportunity. Too many continue to process their statements on legacy systems, print them in black and white, and use standard layouts that look and feel like, well, ledgers. That makes it challenging for even the smartest marketing copy to grab attention.

When it’s time to update a statement, it’s common to focus on streamlining the process and cutting costs. Marketing sometimes weighs in on statement design, improving the look to enhance promotional value. But is that enough? Consider these questions:

Who is your audience, specifically? And is there more than one?

Does your statement design make it easy to find key information at a glance, with an account summary and personalized contact details?

Does it clearly fill customers’ information need and provide transaction details while also serving as a key communications tool that is fully integrated with the marketing plan?

What is the key message you’d like to deliver?

Your statements should be an intentional, strategic and integrated part of your marketing mix. They have the power to enhance your brand and drive new business, as well as help you to gain cost efficiencies.

Think Customer Experience….

Ensuring they do all three things calls for a change of attitude towards your statements. Instead of just a necessary deliverable, think of them as the most visible communication between your CFI and your customer – reliably delivered and consistently read. In fact, you might say the statement is the channel where the customer experience begins – an ideal place to meet expectations … or not. So how well it’s designed can make all the difference.
…Then Take Action

As the channel at the heart of customer communications, your monthly statement (whether paper or electronic) is an integral part of the customer experience. And today, customer experience means everything for CFIs who want to grow and thrive in a crowded competitive landscape.
The ability to deliver exceptional customer experience, as demonstrated by mainstream brands like Amazon, Apple and Uber has set a high bar for financial institutions, including CFIs; when we fall short, it creates an “Experience Gap”– a rift between what customers have learned they can expect and what they actually receive. It’s forcing our industry to confront the gaps in our own service delivery channels, whether it’s in the branch, the call center or at the ATM.

By applying some careful thought and effort you can leverage your monthly statements to bridge the Experience Gap – tying content, look and feel and customer messaging tightly in with the rest of your engagement efforts.

Community financial institutions have strong relationships with their customers – closer than their much larger competitors. It’s a welcome advantage in an industry facing tough competition from big banks, big fintech and even big retail.

But with consumers demanding more convenience in their communication channels of choice, those ties that you’ve built can be in jeopardy, unless you pay attention to “The Experience Gap” – the disconnect between what your customers expect each time they interact with their PFI versus what actually occurs. And today, that gap is becoming a chasm as the digitized world expands.

This widening gap, between your customers’ expectations of a perfect digital relationship and your ability to deliver it, is threatening your business and putting your valuable customer relationships at risk.

What’s a financial institution to do?

Simply avoiding digital channels or, worse, paying them short shrift won’t work. Credit unions and community banks must offer digitized services to remain competitive. Especially if they want to attract Millennials and Gen Xers as new customers. In fact, very soon, it will be a matter of survival: Accenture’s 2015 Digital Banking Survey showed the number-one reason North American consumers stay with their banks is a good online experience.

Get started on the right foot – Offer a frictionless, digital customer experience when you onboard new customers or issue new loans, without all the paper and time it typically consumes. Your customers will appreciate not having to give you the same information time and time again, and your staff will get more time to have that all-important revenue-building conversation.

Engage more fully with each customer – Your customers see all of their interactions with your organization as one conversation. Do you? By deploying Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software you can ensure that every customer touch point is noted and recorded, regardless of origin, so customers never have to repeat themselves and feel like you’ve been listening to them. That way your customers’ interactions will serve to augment, vs. fragment, their overall experience with your institution.

Find out what your customers actually need and want – Collect, store, aggregate and analyze customer data across multiple channels and back-office systems using CRM and Business Intelligence. This will help you pinpoint opportunities to offer the right products and services to the right customer at the right time. Personalized and pertinent communications deliver a more compelling experience, engaging your customers and making them feel like you really understand their needs.

Identify more opportunities to communicate – Take your regulatory communications to the next level. Redesign your statements so they are more customer friendly, with targeted marketing messages that reflect the messaging used in your other promotional
It’s a great way to turn a simple statement into a powerful marketing vehicle.

Prioritize your needs then just get going – Remember, it doesn’t have to be a big bang effort. You can begin your digitization journey just about anywhere that’s most pressing and simply build from there. So long as you keep an eye on the end game – of bridging the experience gap to retain customers, attract new ones, and streamline your key customer-focused processes.

]]>Community financial institutions are facing unprecedented challenges. On one side you’re being squeezed by big banks with deep pockets and, on the other, by out-of-the-box thinking Fintechs and digital disruptors.

But perhaps the biggest threat comes from your customers themselves, who are increasingly demanding integrated, digitized experiences that match the service they’re getting outside the industry, from the likes of Amazon, Uber, AirBnB and Netflix.

Your traditional differentiators – like consistently delivering a personal-touch experience in-branch and on the phone – are being eroded, putting pressure on your community financial institutions to provide an equally high-quality customer experience across all touch points and all channels, all the time.

The bar has been raised. A fact supported by new research from Forrester, which highlights that consumers now expect to more easily connect with brands digitally to get what they want, whenever they want. And Accenture’s most recent Consumer Digital Banking Survey, which cites that the number-one thing that keeps consumers loyal to their primary financial institution is the quality of their digital banking experience.

Recognizing The Experience Gap

Community financial institutions that have not yet put sufficient focus on digital offerings may find they’re victims of something we call ‘The Experience Gap’ – the widening divide between customer expectations and their day-to-day experiences with their community financial institution.

How do you know if you’re trapped in the Experience Gap? Here are three telling signs:

Inconsistent messages across channels
If your loan officer tells a customer she doesn’t qualify for a home loan, it’s not a good time to be emailing her about new low-interest mortgage rates. A better option would be to send her some tips for improving credit scores. If you don’t have the ability to avoid sticky situations like this, and demonstrate to customers that you understand and care about their needs, then you might be in the Gap.

Mediocre online or digital services
Your customers now use online and digital tools to do anything they want at any hour, whether it’s to order a coffee, stream a movie or buy a plane ticket. They expect their financial apps to function just as well as those offered by Starbucks, Netflix or Expedia. If customers’ day-to-day digital or online exchanges with your community financial institution leave them wanting, then you might be in the Gap.

Inconsistent experiences across business areasWhen a customer feels highly satisfied with the service he receives through your account opening process, but then finds applying for a new loan is a huge hassle, the goodwill you earned quickly evaporates. If even one of your member-facing processes leaves something to be desired in terms of member experience, then you might be in the Gap.

]]>We’re already midway through the 21st century’s second decade, yet half of all consumers who subscribe to e-Statements also still receive paper copies, according to a recent Forrester Research study. Is it a felt need for belts and suspender? A security blanket, of sorts? No. Forrester found it’s because their financial institutions simply haven’t found a way to turn off the paper! Early on, many credit unions and community banks allowed customers to continue receiving paper statements to ease them out of their comfort zone. But they never took the next step of cutting out paper. And their print suppliers haven’t exactly been rushing to help them, either!

Strategy? What strategy?

The problem goes deeper than that. In addition to needlessly providing dual statements, many institutions don’t have a well-planned strategy for driving adoption. As a result, e-Statement initiatives often stagnate after the initial marketing push, and reams of paper statements continue to be mailed – wasteful, because cutting out paper can save more than $12/year for each account.

Some financial institutions simply offer e-Statements as an alternative to paper without promoting the many member benefits – like receiving statements quicker than snail mail, having easy, secure online access to their historical statement records on any device, anywhere and anytime, and knowing they being environmentally conscious. These institutions don’t seem to have looked at the strategic and budgetary value that e-Statements bring to their own shops, such as dramatically reducing paper and printing costs, and cutting a huge chunk of the postage budget. Not to mention the operational efficiencies gained when staff can access member statements at the click of a mouse, more easily fielding member statement inquiries.

Strategy + Action = Growth

Doxim’s own experience shows that clients who proactively work to develop and execute an e-Statement strategy average eDelivery rates of more than 50%, with top-ten percentile performers reaching rates in excess of 90%. Some credit unions prefer to take a gentle approach, such as encouraging voluntary e-Statement adoption while others want to be more definitive, with e-Statements offered as the default for new accounts and online-banking members. Still others practice tough love, charging a fee for paper.

The approach your credit union decides to follow will depend on many criteria, such as members’ comfort with technology, how environmentally friendly they want to be; even the availability of reliable internet coverage in communities served. Whichever path is chosen, it’s important to plan for success by giving members adequate advance notice, communicating e-Statements’ clear benefits and offering staff incentives to promote the service.

You can increase your e-Statement adoption by keeping these four key points in mind:

Make it worth their while. Offer incentives for members who turn off their printed statements, and organize an internal contest among staff. Achieving just a 15-20% opt-in level for monthly statements will pay for the program. After that, the savings really add up – savings that can be used for new initiatives.

Know your audience. Design promotional messages tailored to the segments of your membership that will produce the best results. Consider inviting members who haven’t embraced technology to a lunch-and-learn webinar on basic internet usage and how to access their e-Statements. But be aware it isn’t effective to send message after message urging e-Statement adoption to those who simply aren’t interested. Instead, focus on groups of members who are most likely to be open to moving to e-Statements only, like your online banking customers.

Talk about the trees. Environmental benefits attract attention, because most consumers want to participate in a meaningful cause – especially Millennials. Let members know that eliminating as few as 10,000 paper statements a year, cuts greenhouse gases equal to driving more than 70,000 miles in a car. That’s in addition to the 4,000 pounds of paper saved and gasoline savings of over 1,300 gallons.

]]>Intuitively, we know delivering the services members want can convert your relationships into better financial performance. But now there’s proof: Investing in the right technology means higher returns.

Callahan & Associates’ 2015 analysis reviewed the performance of a large group of credit unions that offered easy-access fintech services, like mobile banking, remote deposit capture and electronic bill pay. The study, which compared these credit unions’ results with that of institutions not offering these services, found investing in digital services technology leads to greater growth in three major categories: loans (7.1%, versus 4.1%), shares (3.2%, versus 2.0%) and assets (3.5%, versus 2.3%). What’s more, the forward-looking credit unions’ average member relationship increased by 4% over a six-year period, compared with 3% for those that didn’t make the investment.

But offering anytime, anywhere digital access to members makes it more challenging to stay connected with them. So, how do you keep members engaged in an age of do-it-yourself banking?

For many, the answer is to invest in a powerful Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solution, which allows you to consolidate member information across the organization, whether their digital or person-to-person interactions are with a member services rep, loan officer or the call center. Members never have to tell their story twice, and employees aren’t left wondering how members’ concerns were resolved the last time. Research by Bain & Company’s Frederick Reichheld, (who invented the net promoter score) shows increasing customer retention rates by 5% increases profits by 25% to 95%.The result is greater satisfaction for both members and your staff. And, the report noted, happier members are less likely to leave – and they purchase twice the number of products as unhappy ones. Further, a recent Gallup study showed that fully engaged retail bank customers bring 37% more annual revenue to their PFI than those who are unengaged. And because it’s less expensive to retain members than to attract and serve new ones, a mere 5% increase in retention can lift profits by as much as 80%.

Armed with robust CRM data, your staff can focus marketing efforts on members who are most likely to accept an offer, boosting income up to 41% for each of your member service representatives, while cutting sales and marketing costs by 23%. According to Nucleus Research, the average returns from using a quality CRM system have increased since 2011, from $5.60 to $8.70 for every dollar spent.

As business guru Peter Drucker famously said, “The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well the product or service fits him and sells itself.” Using a powerful CRM to track and analyze your members’ needs can help you tailor marketing communication to each one’s specific interests – a benefit to both members and your bottom line.

See for yourself how a robust CRM program can help your credit union grow revenues and keep members close. Download our eBook, “CRM in Credit Unions: The Undiscovered Revenue Source.”